by Nick Kyme
‘Good,’ he hissed, ‘I shall carve it on my sword when you are dead, so none will forget your bravery.’
He gave a stiff nod in the mortal’s direction by way of salute, and attacked.
During the years he had with his father and grandfather, Makato had been well trained. Even before his tutelage in the art of Shogu was complete, he could best all of the household guard. There was not a man among the Bushiko who did not treat Makato’s sword arm with respect.
Countless drills in the training yards had prepared him, under the shadow of Mount Kiamat where the Tahken Dynasts dwelled upon the mist-shrouded peaks, jealously guarding the secrets of their kaisen blades.
Makato’s training could have afforded him a position in many august professions: Astra Militarum, Adeptus Arbites, Protectorate Nobilis, but in the end he chose to serve the Imperial Navy as an armsman, to maintain the generational thread.
But no training, no will of tempered iron could have prepared him for a one-on-one duel with a warrior of the renegade’s calibre.
Urgaresh went in hard, spitting a curse as he lunged at the mortal. Inexplicably, the blow failed to land but he felt a hot line trace his pectoral muscle instead. The Black Dragon turned, chasing his elusive prey and crafting a slash that went high to low.
Again, the mortal avoided the blow, stepping back with the speed of a well-trained swordsman.
Urgaresh snarled, wondering if his muscles had been irrevocably atrophied from their time in cryo-stasis aboard the Fist of Kraedor.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ he said, as he noticed the mortal looking over his shoulder at the three Black Dragons now standing behind him. ‘You’re fighting me. Don’t insult my honour by suggesting treachery.’
Urgaresh attacked again, filling the corridor with his bulk and favouring an overhead cut he knew the mortal would have to block. Bone scraped against well-honed metal, drawing sparks and filling the corridor with the stink of burned ulna. The mortal avoided the swift counter, a low punch designed to cave his ribs and leave him spitting blood as his organs ruptured. Instead, he rolled aside, allowing the Black Dragon’s bone blade to slide off his sword and embed itself into the deck with the force of its own momentum. Urgaresh drove into the mortal as he tried to slip past again, crushing him into the corridor wall with his shoulder even as his bone blade stuck fast.
The air was driven hard from Makato’s lungs. Winded, he felt a bone fracture somewhere in his side, possibly two ribs. Despite his martial discipline, he let out a yelp of pain but managed to get past the hulking warrior whose weapon was lodged in the deck plate.
Turning on his heels, ignoring the scything agony in his side, Makato thrust two-handed and impaled the warrior’s back. The blade went straight through and punched out of the warrior’s chest in a welter of blood. He tried to withdraw, intending to back off and wait for another chance to counter but the warrior turned too quickly and too violently. Eighteen years of his grandfather telling him never to lose his grip on his sword was rendered meaningless as the weapon was wrenched from Makato’s hands.
Fury was lending Urgaresh strength and speed now. Shutting down the pain of breaking his bone blade so he could face his opponent, ignoring the sword sticking out of his chest, he aimed a savage kick that caught the mortal off-guard and sent him sprawling down the corridor.
Dazed, chest throbbing, nerves screaming, Makato looked up at the dull lume-strips above and realised he had landed on his back. Too badly injured to get to his feet, he reached for his father’s braid that had been flung from his grasp and apologised to the spirit of his grandfather for losing his sword.
Makato hoped, despite his defeat and his death, he had made them proud. He smiled at their memory, imagining the monsoon clouds over Mount Kiamat, training with his patriarchs in the brooding shadow of a storm. It had made him feel so alive, so vital.
The heavy, approaching footfalls of his opponent brought Makato back to his senses.
‘Yugeti…’ he croaked, ‘Hiroshimo…’
Briefly mastering his warrior-rage, Urgaresh gave the mortal a second nod as he stood over him grasping a sword. It was a ceremonial piece, beautifully crafted although more like a short sword in Urgaresh’s massive fist.
‘Whoever those men were,’ he said in a rasp, ‘you honoured them.’
Raising the ceremonial sword, intending to drive it through the mortal’s heart, he added, ‘I hope it is fitting I use this blade to return you to them.’
The tip of the blade stopped a hand span from Makato’s bloody chest.
He looked up, craning his neck to do so, trying to understand his sudden stay of execution. The renegade was locked fast, though his face showed signs of exertion. He wanted to kill Makato, but couldn’t. Ice rimmed the blade in a thin veil of hoarfrost. Tiny particles of it dappled the renegade’s brow and caused his breath to ghost the air in clouds of vapour.
Unable to crane his neck any longer, Makato collapsed back, closed his eyes and surrendered to unconsciousness.
Urgaresh was furious.
‘Where is your honour!’
Though his eyelids were heavy with accumulated frost, he was able to look up at his enemy.
Standing in the open doorway that led to the bridge was a warrior clad in a deep green, though one arm of his battleplate was painted blue. A high metal collar rose up from his gorget around the back of his neck, where thin crackles of lighting could be seen coursing between its psycho-conductive nodes.
Two eyes blazing with cerulean blue regarded Urgaresh from a face as black as onyx. A white arrow-point beard masked the chin. Three cornrows of close shorn hair bisected the scalp in straits of black and white.
Urgaresh felt his anger renewed as he looked up at the witch.
‘Salamander…’ he growled, fuelled with enough rage to break the bonds foisted upon him.
Xarko held out his upraised palm as if brandishing it could stop the Black Dragon.
It could, and did.
The warrior had broken the psychic bindings causing his initial paralysis but now faced an invisible kine-shield that sealed off the entire corridor. Only when the warrior’s aggregated blows struck against it did the impacts bloom like tiny star flashes in midair.
‘You’ll find no passage through here…’ said Xarko, but he was already beginning to show the sounds of strain in his voice.
Three more warriors joined the first, spitting curses and expletives between blows, though the psychic barrier occluded the sound of their guttural voices.
‘Take him,’ Xarko rasped. He was far from at full strength when he emerged from the sanctum. It was the only reason he hadn’t already incinerated the infiltrators and cleansed the Forge Hammer of their presence.
As a pair of armsmen rushed forwards to drag Lieutenant Makato’s prone form back onto the bridge, Xarko felt the absence of souls aboard the ship of the men and women slain by the Black Dragons. It made him angry, but he was also confused as to what could have brought about such an act of aggression from a Chapter the Salamanders considered as allies.
Admittedly, he had never fought alongside them personally and he had heard about the instability of their gene-seed that manifested in their bizarre osseous mutation. The monsters aboard the Forge Hammer bore all the hallmarks, their leader the worst afflicted.
What do you want?+ Xarko managed to send, shocked at the pure animal rage of the leader as he brushed against the Black Dragon’s thoughts. Red, an ocean of red, washed over every instinct, every emotion. Red wrath, black hate – psychically, it was like battering against a fortress gate inlaid with spikes. It hurt.
GET OUT OF MY HEAD, WITCH!+
Another blow. The warrior’s rejection of Xarko’s telepathy was so violent it actually staggered the Librarian. For a moment, he feared the kine-shield would breach but marshalled enough strength to restore it.
Reason was out then. It left little other recourse.
Xarko wanted to crush them, to unleash the full potency of his gifts and rescue the ship but his earlier exertions in the fire tides had severely weakened him. With a growing sense of impotence, he realized he could hold them off but that was all. Every blow was a smack to his already bruised psyche. He didn’t know how long he could last like this. The distress signal had been sent. No doubt the bridge crew were also trying to raise assistance now Xarko had broken their silence. He only hoped it would reach Agatone soon enough to matter and that a weary crew, not a massacre, would await his overdue return.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
To Agatone, it felt as if they had been searching for hours for any piece of evidence that would unlock why Tsu’gan had gone this way and who had gone with him.
The archivium was vast, an immense sprawling space, a catacomb that stretched into the subterranean shadows and went on further still. According to Issak, it was an ancient Imperial repository, an information storage facility. Data within the archive appeared to go back millennia to the time of the first Great Crusade, yet the majority of it was so old that it had fallen into ruin and decrepitude. Much was also so heavily encrypted as to be almost useless.
Not long after he and Issak had entered the place, Agatone had given up trying to glean anything of import from the scribed mess strewn throughout the chamber.
‘Looks relatively undisturbed,’ he had muttered, only partly to himself, as he had regarded the hundreds of stacks replete with books, scrolls, slates and countless other methods of storage. Theodolites sat in dusty alcoves alongside incunabula. Oraculums and divinifiers abutted stone tablets of prognostication. Reams of parchment, trapped in humming stasis fields, ranked up next to scriptora rendered on the flensed skulls of martyrs. It stretched for what appeared to be countless metres, a cornucopia of informational data requiring an army of lex-mechanics, auto-scribes and scriveners to decode and collate.
‘This will make it harder to track them,’ Agatone had concluded when faced with the gargantuan repository.
Once inside the archivium, the readings from the auspex had grown patchy. It got them beyond the threshold of the labyrinth but Agatone soon attached it to his belt, settling for passively scanning the ancient chamber.
Everything was old and carried a heavy veneer of dust. Motes clung to the air, caught in slow motion free fall in the thin shafts of light that penetrated the chamber’s fractured roof. Such scant light did little to lift the gloom, nor did the meagre ventilation help alleviate the choking clouds of dust they had inevitably disturbed.
Without the gifts of his transhuman ally, Issak had to blunder around in the shadows until Agatone had realised he was struggling and snapped on a lume-strip.
‘Here,’ he had said, passing the illuminated stick to the medicus.
In its magnesium-bright flare more details were revealed.
Entire volumes had been colonised by mildew. Mould corroded leather and wood. Data-slates were rusted, their glass screens cracked and useless. Some of the parchments and book bindings had even been gnawed upon. For though the archive was ostensibly sealed within the massive vault, the pervasive vermin of the underhive had still managed to find a nook or cranny through which to gain entry.
Judging by the crack in its main door they had seen earlier, the breach in the archivium’s passive security was recent. Agatone had no doubt Tsu’gan or his companion had perpetrated it.
For long minutes he and Issak had negotiated the musty confines of the archivium in silence, the air so still and thick it subconsciously demanded a certain solemn observance. It was after a particularly lengthy stretch that Agatone finally broke this quietude.
‘Watch your step, medicus.’ He put out a warning hand, the other one currently occupied by his bolt pistol.
Part of the floor had fallen away, revealing a gaping dark hole into the all-consuming and ever-hungry sink of the underhive. Everything was drawn to it, or so Agatone had come to feel, its gravity impossible to resist. And the only way to stay beyond its reach was to climb, build higher and higher, new atop old and layer upon layer. Those who did not, or could not, would be dragged to this pit never to return.
Having protected the medicus this far, Agatone had no desire to lose his charge to mishap.
Issak nodded in gratitude and, as he raised the lume-strip to get a better sense of his surroundings and footing, saw something in the congested route ahead.
‘Does that look fresh to you?’ he asked.
Agatone followed his gaze.
One of the stacks was damaged, hacked apart to make a passage through it. Clean and raw blade marks were visible in the hard wood.
‘They went this way.’
As he reached the shattered wood, Agatone paused to inspect it. He ran a hand across the split, trying to gauge what kind of weapon could have made it.
‘Single hit…’ he muttered, again only partially to himself. ‘Bladed weapon… very wide.’
A blunted chainaxe sprang to mind. Blunted or simply exhausted of power.
Definitely Adeptus Astartes, Agatone was certain.
‘Recent…’ he said, concluding the analysis. He looked over his shoulder at Issak. ‘We must hurry.’
Issak seemed not to hear him and was panning his lume-strip around the stacks, picking through scraps of displaced parchment.
Agatone barked at him, impatient to be moving on. ‘What is it?’
‘Everything looks…’ Issak met the Salamander’s irritated gaze, his face faintly lit in the glow of the lume-strip, ‘familiar.’
‘I thought you said you’d only heard of this place, not been here?’ asked Agatone, frowning in consternation.
‘I haven’t, but I still recognise it. As if I have memories of this place, but no idea where they’re from or to whom they belong.’
Agatone sniffed the air.
‘Atmosphere in here is addling your mind, medicus.’ The auspex began to chime softly but insistently. Agatone unclipped it and checked the screen. Then he looked up. ‘Shine the strip over there,’ he said to Issak, pointing to where he wanted the light.
Issak obeyed, revealing a sweeping stairway cluttered with debris but still passable.
‘No more delays,’ Agatone growled, sensing his prey was close, and made for the stairs.
He emerged well ahead of the medicus into an upper level. Several of the archivium’s sealed stacks here had been broken open, their locks cast aside in haste.
‘Here,’ Agatone called down as he sighted an old lifter at the back of the room, its activation panel glowing with life. ‘We rise, medicus.’
A long, metal shaft was bored down into the roof of the archivium surrounded by a lattice of reinforced plasteel. Agatone realised they must have been exploring the basement levels of the repository, where its oldest records were kept. He assumed the upper levels were no more, consumed by war, disaster or time. Only this fragment of the archivium had endured but so too had its entry shaft and the lifter that would convey them to the surface.
Breathless, Issak reached the summit of the stairway and saw what had captured the Salamander’s attention.
‘You want me to ride in that? It’s probably at least hundreds of years old!’
Agatone smiled darkly. ‘Someone has revivified it, medicus. We will follow them.’
Scowling, Issak approached Agatone who was already throwing back the lifter’s security gate.
‘Why do I get the impression you’re enjoying this?’
‘Because we are close. For good or ill, Tsu’gan is coming back with me. That’s all that matters now.’
He wrenched the gate aside with a loud clatter and ushered the medicus within. When Issak was standing on the boarding plate, hands firmly gripping the guide rails, Agatone followed an
d closed the gate after.
‘Up?’ Issak hazarded, standing next to the operation panel.
Agatone nodded, craning his neck so he could look to the summit of the shaft where a faint scrap of light beckoned. ‘Up, medicus.’
Issak hit the activation stud and the lifter started to rise.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Sturndrang, the underhive of Molior
They were moving. It was all Exor could tell with any degree of certainty. Consciousness was fleeting, flickering in and out like a lamp pack struggling for power.
He saw the tunnel he had crawled through, though this time he had the vague sensation of being dragged.
Then the Well and him rising, the hard breaths and grunted curses of his saviour accompanying him every metre they climbed.
It was a long climb, though Exor only experienced it in fragments.
‘Where…?’ he managed to croak, before blacking out.
A hard smack and hot lances of pain in his cheek brought Exor back around. His head was throbbing and it was hard to breathe. His skin burned like it was on fire. Sweat lathered his back, face and chest as his enhanced biology reacted to the severe wound he had been dealt.
‘Wake up!’ snapped a guttural voice.
A second blow – it hurt just as much as the first.
‘Rest is for the dead,’ declared the voice, ‘and the weak.’
A third blow was threatened that Exor stopped.
‘Cease,’ he croaked, dizzy and faintly aware he was lying with his back against a wall.
Despite his ocular augmentations, the image that eventually resolved in front of him was indistinct, but he immediately recognised Zartath’s snarling visage.
‘The thing that caused the keening is dead. I am free of it,’ he growled. ‘We are going back. Our original mission is still unfinished. Agatone charged us with tracking his quarry, so that is what we are going to do.’
‘I can barely stand, let alone track,’ said Exor.
‘You need do neither,’ Zartath replied. ‘You came after me when you could have left me for dead. That’s twice I owe you fire-born a debt.’